Wireless Acoustic Emission Transmission System Designed for Fault Detection of Rotating Machine

Acoustic Emission (AE) has been adopted widely in structural health monitoring of buildings, walls, bridges, and has shown great potentials in incipient rotating machine fault detection [1, 2]. However, one inevitable problem that hinders AE of being practically applied in rotating machine fault detection is the transmission of AE signal inside the machine, as AE signal generally comprises high frequency components of typically 100kHz to 1MHz which will require transmission system to have extremely high data-rate for real-time monitoring. Traditional digital wireless system, for instance, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, cannot satisfy the requirement. This paper addresses the issue of wireless AE transmission for rotating machine, with a modified analogue AE wireless transmission system. Piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS), a labcrafted miniature sensor was adopted to fulfill the need of small system.